Balancing interruption frequency and buffering penalties in VBR video streaming

The main goal of a streaming application is to enable the successful decoding of each video object before its displaying deadline is violated, and to recover from a deadline violation properly. Hence, we define the main performance metric of a streaming system as the number of interruptions during a video presentation, or the number of jitters. Previous literature has described solutions to estimate the jitter-free probability for an entire video segment. In this work, we present a novel analytical framework, which requires only a Markov Variable Bit Rate (VBR) channel model, to study the frequency of jitters under the constraint of initial playback delay, receiver buffer size, and different jitter recovering schemes. Both the infinite and finite buffer cases are considered. This technique is then applied to investigate streaming over a wireless system modeled by an extended Gilbert channel with ARQ transmission control. Experimental results with MPEG-4 VBR encoded video validate our analysis. Finally, we show that the proposed analysis provides a theoretical foundation to quantify the tradeoffs between the jitter frequency, jitter recovering delay, initial delay, and the receiver buffer size for a general class of VBR streaming over random VBR channels with different jitter recovering schemes.